Bulletin , OMR & RCA 4 Articles at Lifeissues.net

Articles

As most of you know, it was in 1953 that Dr John Billings was, in his own words, "drawn reluctantly into spending one night a week as a medical consultant to Fr Maurice Catarinich who had been appointed by Archbishop Daniel Mannix as a Marriage Consultant for the Archdiocese of Melbourne."

Professor Brown's contribution to both Medicine and Science is an integral part of his contribution to the Billings Ovulation Method. It was his expertise in the pituitary and ovarian hormones that first led John and Lyn Billings to meet with Professor Brown when he came to Melbourne in the early 1960s.

Contemporary teaching of the Catholic Church on matters such as contraception, abortion, infanticide and euthanasia has not occurred in a social, moral, intellectual, and political vacuum. Nor did it occur independently of the Church's longstanding teaching on these matters contained within the Catholic tradition. Indeed contemporary Catholic moral teaching rests upon the development of specific themes in the tradition dealing with the nature of the marital act, fornication, adultery, and the sanctity of human life. The moral positions of the Catholic Church were, until comparatively recently, also matters of shared moral conviction within Western societies. This is not surprising given the crucial formative role of the Catholic Church in Western culture. But the same shared moral convictions have, over the last one hundred and twenty years, been greatly eroded such that many societies now base their legal foundations on a secularism which denies settled moral positions on sexual matters and certain life issues. The default moral position in these areas (but not others) is now "personal choice".